"Observation: Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through...an impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally.

Perceptually, this simultaneous input engages me like the kinetic equivalent of an abstract or impressionist painting...phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence. Transient and elusive, these must be grasped quickly:

Computer animations imbue even breakfast cereals with an hallucinogenic futurity; music channels process information-blips avoiding linear presentation, implying limitless personal choice...

These reference points established, an emergent worldview becomes gradually discernible amidst the media's white noise.

This jigsaw-fragment model of tomorrow aligns itself piece by piece, specific areas necessarily obscured by indeterminacy. However, broad assumptions regarding this postulated future may be drawn, We can imagine its ambience. We can hypothesize its psychology.

In conjunction with massive forecasted technological acceleration aproaching the millenium, this oblique and shifting cathode mosaic uncovers the blueprint for an era of new sensations and possiblities. An era of the conceivable made concrete...And of the casually miraculous.

As an afterthought, The method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards...the subject of a subsequent discourse, perhaps.

Observation ends,

Veidt, New York time, eleven eighteen p.m. Log and file."

- Monologue of Adrian Veidt, a character from Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen.

RECORD>>SPLINTER>>SCRAMBLE

We suffer from information overload.

We absorb too much; too many songs; too many movies; tv series; documentaries; books, magazines, web pages. A case of mental indigestion. Sounds, images, abstract concepts, storylines, articles, essays, radio jingles, tv adverts, all mixed up in a apparently sense-les, structure-less vortex. A Chaos. Our hard disk is full and in bad need of de-fragmenting.

We had to create our own channel. The Chaos Channel. Our very own TV station. The Sewer Channel...
We had to find some way to "purge" the space between our ears.

In our minds, the information we receive is broken up in pieces, processed, compacted, folded, reduced to its simpler components; otherwise it would be impossible to interact with "objective" reality.

Inspired by the cut up techniques of Burroughs and Gysin, Gen. P. Orridge, came up with the concept of splintering, a word that describes this process.

These splinters of information can be considered as holographic; meaning that each of them, no matter how small or brief, contains the whole of what they were once part of.

Let's say I project, in a typical AV session, a Swastika, followed by an image of Jesus, or Mickey Mouse, or Virgin Mary, or a corpse at an autopsy, or a baby emerging from a distended vulva, or some cows happily chewing grass in a green field. All these images, even if they remain on screen for a split second, will be assimilated instantaneously, and, due to their strong emotional charge and quasi-archetipic nature will provoke manifestation (another Psychic TV term) in the mind of the spectator; a series of associations and reverberations that will result in the re-creation and re-construction of clusters of history, whole systems of thought or belief.

To me, the work of a VJ consists in deconstructing packages of pre-edited visual information, splintering them to their basic components; icons, symbols, memes. Using these little "bullets of meaning" we can pierce the language barrier, reach the deeper levels of the audience's psyche. Generate manifestation. Remove the sediments of the unconscious; activate processes that ultimately can lead to attitudinal changes, the liberation of repressed emotions or urges.

Today, it seems that all the information we absorb is edited in some way or another.

In our effort to follow sequentially the plots and dialogue of common TV shows, movies, etc. we tend to forget the series of hidden connections and overlappings that inform them. That Disney blockbuster, this sitcom, those gossip reviews are far form being "harmless entertainment", if there ever was such a thing. There's always a subtext. Most of this material is propaganda of some form, disguised as "objective" information.

"Eisenstein argued that --Montage is conflict-- where new ideas emerge from the collision of images and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence. A new concept explodes into being.

Eisenstein argued that the new meaning that emerged out of conflict is the same phenomenon found in the course of historical events of social and revolutionary change. He used intellectual montage in his experimental films (such as “October”) to portray the political situation surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution.

He also believed that intellectual montage expresses how every-day thought processes happen. In this sense, the montage will in fact form thoughts in the minds of the viewer, and is therefore a powerful tool for propaganda."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_montage

When we splinter these information packages, we are bypassing this edition or assembly; we try to show the viewer the naked components of what they have previously swallowed whole, unconsciously. Linear narratives and logic are suspended. To an appropiate musical beat, contradictory images and scenes are juxtaposed. Words, as animated typography, loose their linguistic-semantic value and devolve to their original form; something closer to pictograms. All this material is shown disjointed, fragmented, randomized. It is a reflection of Channel Chaos, inside our head. A sample of totality. The embracing of opposites. What you see in an AV session, then, is closer to the unconscious processes such as dreams and free association, than other mediums in which the viewer plays a more passive role.

Seen in this light, this thing, the jamming of musical and video performers or VJing --the relentless firing of significant and apparently unrelated images and symbols to music-- takes on a quasi-ritual or liturgic meaning. Acting together, the artists become the catalysts of a magickal-alchemical process which conveys the transformation of both the audience and the performer...But it always has been that way, isn't it?

Arturo Gil / XNO
Malinalco, Estado de México,
México 2004